Tag Archive for ‘gecko’

It has been quite a while since the last blog post, so here is a fresh set of updates from our current projects, as listed on the wiki:

Nightingale 1.11 is coming!

We’re giving Nightingale 1.11 its finishing touches and plan to release it this month. Nightingale 1.11 is based on Songbird 1.11.0a / Gecko 1.9.2 and provides, among other things, better performance, a play queue for temporary playlists and finally official Mac OS X support. Of course all Nightingale-specific features introduced in 1.8 still persist, like our Coppery feather, the use of the system’s GStreamer on Linux, the folder synchronization feature, playlist folders, and tons of fixed bugs!

We do not have any update infrastructure yet, so you will need to update manually after the release. If you’re feeling brave, you don’t have to wait for the release! You can try out our current development version by using the test builds (currently Windows and Mac builds are available), or by building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch on your own. If you need help building, refer to our build page or contact us on the forums or via IRC. Of course, you should feel free to contact us with any other issues as well! 😉

Nightingale 1.11 uses the Songbird namespace internally. While this fact may seem interesting to developers alone, it does improve extension porting speed and compatiblity, meaning most Songbird add-ons compatible with Songbird 1.11.0a can be ported to Nightingale 1.11 easily. Of course, this also means Nightingale 1.11 extensions can also be easily ported to Songbird.

CoMETE – Student Developers at Nightingale

The student developers announced in our last blog post are now assigned to projects. Currently they’re working on the basics for features like CD Ripping, Social and Cloud service integration, equalizer preset support, and meta-data completion based on audio fingerprints. We can look forward to an awesome set of features coming in the near future.

Other Projects

Our primary focus is the 1.11 release; there is still progress being made in other projects:

Our upcoming add-on platform, featherweight is still in development. There is progress on modeling the database, but it will need some time to complete. We hope to get all of the basic work done by the time we’ve completed our

update to Gecko 6, which is the next point on the list. There is some progress, but there is much effort needed to complete it, and we gladly accept any help on this conversion that comes our way!

We’re also investigating a partnership with Babelzilla to provide the locales for Nightingale

Especially with the conversion to Gecko 6, but for all projects in general, we’re searching for new developers to join the team. There are not only C++ specific changes and fixes needed, so don’t hesitate to join us, even if you’re not comfortable with it! We need to improve the UI (XUL) and clean up some JavaScript as well. We assure you, there is plenty of work available for everyone! 😛

We’ll release another blog post when we release 1.11, and although the blog-every-two-weeks-thing didn’t work out perfectly this time, we’ll still try to keep you as updated as possible!